Probability Amplitudes
by Aenigmatic
Summary: On the day that she decides to walk away from academia, Dr. Jane Foster is called into an elite research group that does top secret projects to figure out a problem involving Loki Laufeyson. AU.


**Probability Amplitudes**

**Summar**y: On the day that she decides to walk away from academia, Dr. Jane Foster is called into an elite research group that does top secret projects to figure out a problem that involves Loki Laufeyson. Written for the Lokane fanwork exchange 2013.  
**Rating:** T  
**Spoilers:** References to all the movies, particularly _Thor: The Dark World_.

{…}

Jane Foster gets a letter just as she picks up the latest piece of an academic career that's on its way to ruin.

The official letterhead gives her pause but her disobedient fingers are already ripping open the envelope, eager to devour its contents. What she finds inside is a single sheaf of weighted paper, the sort that she has longed to hold in her hands for months.

It's news too good to be true, too overwhelmingly positive that a suspicious motive has to lie behind it.

Disbelief turns into surprise which turns into anger in the space of seconds.

After all the rejected applications for a grant and a research position that she'd received in the past year, why would they come calling now just as she'd decided she wants nothing more to do with them, offering her all the enticements like fruits on a golden plate?

Such cruelty can only be wrought by cosmic irony. Her pride's still intact, however, and she isn't about to grovel.

In the end, the letter gets crumpled and flung aside, arching perfectly to land in a forgotten pile of files, books and folders that her roommate jokingly terms 'the treasury of rejected ideas'. Jane spares it another glance and decides that the stubborn stain in the kitchen sink will be her distraction today.

The bonfire that she lights that night coincides with the happy celebrations of Halloween. She hears the shouts of children and the doors that creak open with trick-and-treating while she watches the ends of the letter curl black as it's eaten by fire.

{…}

The phone call comes exactly twelve hours later.

"Dr. Foster?"

She knows that voice. It's the gratingly polite tones of a secretary who has been through all the crap that academia is capable of and then some.

Days, weeks and even months ago, Jane thinks she would have crawled on a bed of nails just to hear it again as she imagined the many outcomes of her situation (and not all of them would have been positive). Still, her traitorous heart throbs its loud anxiety into her head and expunges the false sense of equanimity and acceptance that she's tried to cultivate.

The phone gets passed from the secretary to an elderly tenured professor and finally to the head of programs, who speaks to her earnestly as though he has seen neither hide nor hair of her research proposals or her pleas written in the guise of application letters.

He probably hasn't, to give him the benefit of the doubt. Her proposals had most likely reached the bin too quickly before he can even walk the few steps out of his office to look for new and shiny things to play with.

_We need you_, they say, like the sycophants they are permeating every inglorious seam of academia. Jane is flabbergasted, flattered and insulted all at once, until she really hears what they're trying to tell her. Then her excitement betrays her, making small beads of sweat emerge at the back of her neck as her body adjusts to the shock that crackles and lingers at the base of her spine.

The call lasts all of five minutes.

In an hour, her whole room's packed up.

The next few hours are spent on a plane to New York, a trek across the country that's symbolic enough for her to recognise that she's severing all ties to an old life that consists of Donald Blake, painful all-nighters and too many rejected symposium papers.

She peers out of the small, oval window and sees nothing but white, fluffy clouds, then wonders if she's simply dreaming and standing on them. Because she'll wake up and fall straight through these things that look materially solid but aren't.

That night in a different city, Jane comes home to a fully furnished apartment that's spanking new with a polished wooden floor and feels like an alien in her own country.

{…}

A man couldn't have possibly disappeared into the thin air, as they tell her, after an accident that blew out the extensive circuitry of this entire grid in the neighbourhood.

Dr. Loki Laufeyson is not a negligible loss that will fall between the lines of a report. His work in the institution is too important and too influential for anyone to even think of assigning the 'missing-in-action' label to him.

Speculative rumours about his fate abound. The human body could have been disintegrated by the sheer force of the generator, its frail constitution consumed immediately by its white-hot energy spikes. Or maybe he had been sent straight into another universe and is now walking among the stars.

The further down the chain of command goes, the more absurd the story becomes.

Jane dismisses the fanciful suppositions and looks only at facts.

It's the very reason that she has been employed, because her theories have always leant on the wild side and on the far edge of academic reason. Bluntly put, Jane's their crack option and their last resort to finding Dr. Laufeyson. Make no mistake, she's the outcast scientist to whom they turn when all rational options have been run to the ground and bled dry as stones.

She resists snorting aloud when they put that message across to her as diplomatically as they can. But they don't know she isn't the same person who'd weathered the storm with her tail between her legs in the first couple of years. The exile in Puente Antiguo had after all been mostly voluntary, occurring over a time period when professional and personal identity had been inextricably bound together with paper achievements.

She's simply tired of the synonyms that exist for the word 'ruin'.

{…}

Those who hadn't heard of Loki Laufeyson could have only been living in a hole for the past decade. He is famous in his own right in both the astrophysics and the engineering fields for his own theories on the space-time continuum and infamous enough to graze the back pages of nearly every high-society magazine. Jane still cannot decide whether she has developed a far-off fangirl crush based on his pictures or on his intriguing publications that are lapped up by every scientist remotely interested in general relativity.

Her presence in the institute generates some interest and not all of it is welcome. The questioning looks at the lunch tables on her first day make Jane automatically straighten her posture defensively as she carves an awkward path to the stalls, feeling more out of place than a goat at a banquet table. But it's also the whispers that get her and every one scores a stinging groove under her skin: perhaps an affair with the director had gotten her past the institute's hallowed walls, or maybe a generous donation from a benefactor has given her boundless access.

Science is the only altar on which she can keep her eyes without wavering in the face of the staggering, hurtful murmurs.

There's a job to complete and that alone gives her the courage to carry her food tray back to the lab with her head held high.

Jane also promises herself that this assignment will be her last one in the field – after she brings Laufeyson back. It'll be a personal accomplishment, her swan song that she'll look back upon with pride.

{…}

Erik Selvig becomes her saving grace.

Jane rediscovers old ties when she realises that Selvig is an old colleague of her father, a naturalised Swedish-American professor-cum-scientist whose enthusiasm – tinged at the edges with some insanity – can sometimes get as painful as the bright summer sunlight.

Sliding into the role of mentor and mentee is as natural as an adoptive parent taking an orphan in, but she thinks she can grow fond of him quickly.

In her welcome folder that's as thick as a dissertation, she learns that there's a team already assembled for her, its personnel already acquainted with her work. Anything that she needs will be presented on a silver platter to her, provided she fulfils the only caveat that had brought her here in the first place.

"The team calls it the tesseract," Erik tells her on the day she arrives. "Short, easy name to remember."

Her brow furrows. "The tesseract? You mean the wormhole generator?"

Erik smiles thinly. "Yes, but I think it's better that you see it for yourself."

Jane puzzles over the funny term as Erik taps his access card on the door's sensor. Her eyes slide shut of their own accord when she feels the hum of the machines through the soles of her booted feet as the reinforced glass doors part effortlessly for her.

"This is your lab," he announces and gestures around him carelessly. "It's also Loki's office," he adds unnecessarily.

Jane pauses to take it all in.

The research laboratory is everything her old one in Puente Antiguo isn't: shiny and blinding white and laid out as neatly as an Ikea warehouse. It's also intimidating, cavernous and equipped to the nines with the latest technologies that do impossible mathematics, filled with wondrous, unnameable secrets still locked within these four walls.

The sensory overload is going to last a week but in time, she'll eventually learn how the big boys play the game.

Erik isn't stopping.

He walks down the centre aisle to the back wall and with another access card, taps surreptitiously against the wall. The institute's biggest covert operation unfolds itself before her eyes when several, heavy blast doors open in succession before her.

If Jane thinks that the adjoining lab as impressive, nothing compares to the spherical subterranean hall she's just stepped into. Integrated systems cover the curve of the wall in front of her, converging on a large, translucent screen that throws out lines and lines of numbers and readings. A distance ahead, double holographic veils encase the room's centrepiece, throwing persistent dappled shadows on white surfaces as they blink security warnings codes in a steady stream of green and red.

"The tesseract," she whispers to herself, unable to tear her eyes away from the fist-sized prism. Upon closer inspection, Jane sees that the cube is made of conductible metal spokes, a cube housed within a larger cube. Smooth beams of bright blue energy protect and secure its secrets, pulsing along its clean scaffolding at regular intervals.

"Wow."

It's the holy grail of science, after all, the reality of years of research that will shatter every preconceived notion about the existence of alternate realities, multiple universes and undiscovered galaxies.

For her, it sounds like a fairy tale with a happily-ever-after that's still being scripted.

"That's Loki's crowning achievement," Erik supplies morosely, "until it all went wrong."

"I've never seen anything like it," she admits, awed fascination defining the set of her jaw as she watches the lines redraw and realign themselves along the tesseract's inner spokes. They race along the edges in opposite directions so quickly that it dazzles the eyes just to look.

"Not many have. We've only just begun the beta testing phases, until, well…until the accident happened," Erik trails off and points to the tesseract after clearing his throat once uncomfortably.

"I'll get to work on it immediately," she promises for Erik's sake.

"Everything here is state-of-the-art," he tells her helpfully.

"Yeah," Jane laughs shakily at the look on his face, heady with the knowledge that she's looking at the actualisation of theory right here, right now. "I can see that."

Erik makes a wide circle around the tesseract to temporarily disable to security systems with the tap of a few keys on a keyboard placed on its left side. "Have you read the reports yet?"

"I started with the most important ones," she admits.

"It's a good place to start," Erik nods his approval. "Then you know exactly what this does?" He's looking at her sharply, as though he expects that she'll be able to whip a miracle out from a bottomless bag of ideas.

A genuine smile stretches her face so wide that it hurts.

Even though the cube is Loki Laufeyson's construction, Jane relishes that how she has been right all along. The tesseract's an honest-to-goodness wormhole generator in the tiny form of a three-dimensional cube, the material expression of all her hypotheses.

A bridge to the stars. And beyond.

"Yes."

{…}

The whiteboard in the drawing room gets filled with her own calculations, written and re-written with her hypotheses that too many people used to call 'fancy squiggles'. When the life of the institution's most famous scientist is hanging on her shoulders, no one laughs anymore at every wild thread of thought that comes to her head. From the inky tip of her board whiteboard marker, Jane throws out theory after theory, crunching numbers day and night in a manner that she hasn't done since her post-graduate days.

Her table – set up next to Loki's own – is littered with his personal files and meticulously-archived notes of every stage of the project. She peruses his reports and his scientific journals repeatedly until the pages are worn with the sweat from her fingers and the edges fray from her constant flipping.

It's hard not to imagine the man behind these words – articulate, brilliant and acerbic to the point of indifference. The more she reads, the more she thinks she'd like to meet him.

The blue spine of a hardback catches her eye, bleached a peculiar shade with the passing of time. It's tucked between two thick books on the middle shelf like a runt among giants. With disbelief, she reaches for it as the title confirms what she thinks it is all along. It's so obscure that few bookshops carry it and even then, it had to be bought by special order only.

Her breath catches when she discovers that her work on gravitational lancing and light curves has somehow found a place in Loki's book collection.

Why would he ever have need of it?

Her surprise is amplified when she absently peruses rest of his eclectic book collection. Among the smattering of fiction, biographies and engineering journals, Jane realises Loki owns more than just that book that she'd written. In fact, every publication that she's ever penned is in there somehow, scattered among the seminal works of physics.

Shaking her head, Jane tries to put that disturbing discovery away.

{…}

Exactly twenty-four hours later, doubt and despair weave a web through her thoughts. No longer carried by the adrenaline that had coursed through her veins when she'd hit the ground running, Jane slumps in her chair and takes a long pull of the steaming coffee as she fights the fatigue that threatens to shut down her body.

What can she hope to achieve when it seems as though he'd exhaustively covered every angle that comes to mind?

She raises a hand to rub at her eyes in a careless upswing that sends the coffee all over Loki's pristine white reports. Her tiredness is momentarily forgotten as she jumps up from her chair to salvage the papers from the spreading brown stain.

_Damn._

If Loki ever does get back, she'd be the first one to whom he would pay a visit, Jane thinks grimly and it wouldn't be gratitude she'd be hearing from him.

Call it serendipity perhaps, but it's in the middle of the clean-up that she spots a set of equations tucked into the last pages of a folder that she'd carelessly chucked aside. The spilt coffee is forgotten as she whips it out with trembling fingers.

Although it's exactly what she's looking for, it's also incomplete.

Loki Laufeyson's salvation has yet to be written. But that will be done by the end of the day, she promises herself.

Picking up the nearest pencil, Jane gets to work.

She completes nearly everything in twenty hours.

{…}

Another four hours later, drunk on coffee and scratchy-eyed from sleeplessness, she interrupts a meeting among the rest of the eggheads as they debate how to bring Loki back.

The stuff that's on the conference board is old. The numbers don't lie; neither do the calculations but there's also human error that slides into the cracks that many people miss.

Perhaps it's Dutch courage in the form of hastily-imbibed caffeine that gives her the gumption to do what she never does, or perhaps it's the grating voice of a short, balding scientist in particular who gives her the creeps that does it.

Jane pulls a red marker from her pocket and crosses out the string of equations covering the entire left bit of the board to stunned silence.

"The fundamental problem," she begins, as she goes to the core of the problem at hand, "is that the shut-down sequence of the tesseract had only been partially accounted for, resulting in a build-up of power that converted matter into pure energy."

A murmur of confusion ripples through the seated bodies. She ignores the low voices of dissent, already scribbling her findings on pockets of empty spaces that she can find. That includes the white wall next to her.

"What are you saying, Dr. Foster?"

She sighs and slams down a thick binder on the table. Convincing them is going to be hard, but she's not prepared to go down without a fight.

"I'm saying that a freak power surge during the activation process had caused the tesseract to act as a storage buffer rather than as a bridge between realms at the very last minute. When the emergency failsafe tried to abort the start-up sequence, in the process, it caused the energy output to spike off the charts in that last millisecond. The power that the tesseract channelled at that moment had the ability to demolecularise everything in its path. In this case, it's unfortunate that the only being in its path at that point in time was Dr. Laufeyson."

"You are claiming that Dr. Laufeyson is dead."

"No," she denies immediately. "The subspace wormhole hadn't been formed yet when he was demolecularised. But the tesseract had received all the encoded information that it needed in order to transmit whatever is lies in its buffer through the wormhole."

"Where then, is Dr. Laufeyson?"

Jane points to the crude drawing of the cube that one of the scientists had done. "Nowhere. He's there."

"You're mean that Dr. Laufeyson is _inside_ the tesseract?"

She grimaces at how ridiculous it sounds when put that way. "His _demolecularised_ form is within its buffer unit, yes."

"How would you-"

"I've seen the security footage, Dr. Smithson, and I've also reviewed reports of the event more than a dozen times," she cuts in hastily. "Dr. Laufeyson was standing in direct line of the energy output when the power surge occurred."

"Dr. Foster, do you know how ridicu-"

"Impossible!"

"No, it isn't," she argues, only to be interrupted again.

"This isn't what we-"

"Dr. Foster-"

Jane sighs in exasperation and wishes she could tune them all out. As far as the rest are concerned, her 'revelation' is a sensationalist attempt by a maverick to introduce a distracting line of thought in their well-laid plans.

Bickering ensues until she thinks she'll go down with this sinking ship-

"Enough!"

A loud bellow from the back of the room cuts the heated arguments short. A tall man with a covered eye stalks to the front and glares them down.

"Dr. Foster was hired specifically because you goons go over the same thing over and over again without producing anything useful," he tells them brusquely. "Now that she speaks and offers something else besides what you've already thrown out, I'd suggest you listen, gentlemen."

As grateful as she is to Nick Fury for intervening, she wonders how they'll react to her equally radical solution to bring Loki back. Jane clenches her fists and prays that whatever she'll say next will go down reasonably well.

{…}

It goes disastrously, of course, the way things in her life never really go according to plan. But she's strayed off the beaten track for so long that this is yet another obstacle in the way which she learns to sidestep.

They go ahead with the reintegration procedure anyway, after Fury's reluctantly penned signature on a rushed proposal has her trying to reverse the entire process in order to get Loki Laufeyson to re-materialise.

It's such a massive undertaking that she needs the help of the entire department to redesign a new interface that can support a system override. Cartloads of coffee and pop tarts are consumed and she never leaves her table – Loki's table – for more than a few hours other than to catch a few winks and a shower.

But finally, finally, the impossible gets done.

She sprints into the hall as soon as she gets the call, comes to a stop a respectful distance away from the tesseract and keeps her eyes glued onto the energy pulses that ripple on its spokes. They glow brighter than ever before as her attention flickers between the rate of the energy output and the alarming whine that the cube starts to emit.

With a flip of a switch, a computer engineer manually overrides the built-in failsafes.

Under the hawk-like stares of the other scientists, she waits for the inevitable rush of power to run unchecked along the tesseract's conduits. The hum of energy stutters to an abrupt halt as the resulting starburst dances in patterns through her closed lids when it all comes to a head.

When the emergency lights flicker back on, a tall man dressed in dark pants and a white shirt is the first thing she sees, crouched in a half-kneeling position before he gets to his feet, disoriented by the lingering smoke that veils the entire hall.

She knows that face, seen it a hundred times through the blurry, coloured prints of magazines and newspapers but it's only after reading his journals that she feels as though she knows the man more intimately than she'd liked to do so.

A shout of disbelief in the vicinity of the back door is the sound that spurs everything else into motion.

Loki Laufeyson is surrounded by the rest of the team as he endures the back slapping and the looks of happy incredulity on their faces. The scientific chatter goes on a mile a minute and Jane takes an involuntary step back, already forgotten by the masses.

She's alright with that.

Her reward is the validation of her years of work found within this very device called the tesseract and her only regret is that she'll be vacating that dream spot in the lab (and the groundbreaking science that comes with it) that she's occupied for all of thirty-two hours. Unconsciously, Jane glances longingly at the door through which the adjoining lab can be found, suddenly needing the haven that's composed of the white noise of machinery.

When she looks back, nothing prepares her for the intense stare Loki levels at her with feverishly bright green eyes that the white glare of the bulbs cannot diminish.

The next day, she cleans up the lab while he's confined in the local hospital.

{…}

Packing up the second time is easier. Jane does it more mechanically than she does the first as she absently considers her next career step. Transitions were never meant to be easy after all.

The doorbell rings as she's in the middle of stuffing her last two scientific journals into an overloaded bag.

Jane swings it open to see Loki waiting at the threshold. "I'm sorry about the coffee and your notes," she blurts out then cringes.

He arches a brow quizzically at her strange greeting. "Dr. Foster. May I come in?"

Mutely, she nods and steps aside for him to walk through, shock making her limbs – and unfortunately, her mouth – move on automatic.

Immaculately dressed in a black suit and a white shirt, Loki's the only sharp-looking thing in the mess that presently characterises her apartment. An impulsive glance towards her grey, frayed indoor slippers makes her wince at how underdressed he manages to make her feel even in her own home.

He takes stock of the well-furnished place, but is inevitably drawn to the stark white piece of paper that lies on the dining table.

She eyes him warily as he picks it up and reads it.

"A formal resignation?" He asks without preamble some curiosity lining his face.

Uncomfortably, she nods once in assent. "Erik says it isn't needed, but I thought-"

"Why?"

There are so many things wrong with this first meeting. No greetings, no small talk or niceties…merely a question that cuts dangerously close to unearthing the reasons why she's choosing at last, to walk away from all of this.

Jane opens her mouth to shoot off a defence, then shuts it before a word can escape, rethinking her stance. "I think my reasons aren't any business of yours, Dr. Laufeyson."

He acknowledges her rebuff with a smirk, approaching her with deliberate slowness. Up close, he's taller than she imagined, exuding none of the nervous energy that radiated from him on the day he re-materialised in the testing room. Now she sees a confident mien, a smooth veneer without the raw edges that she has glimpsed that day. Only his loosely-flowing black hair defies convention as it brushes the collar of his shirt, the single, outward hint of what she thinks is a roiling sea of unpredictability and chaos barely reined in by his polite exterior and tailored suit.

"It isn't, Dr. Foster," he affirms lazily, "But if the letter says what I believe it says, then it's such a pity that you, of all people, would walk away at the moment of your triumph."

Her great moment of triumph had been as ephemeral as a shooting star that lights the night sky; the tweaks and additions that she'd made to the theoretical aspects of the tesseract's functionality were small – even if by no means insignificant – in comparison to what Loki had accomplished and hardly worthy of this personal housecall.

"You don't know half the story," she insists.

Loki's chuckle is deep and knowing. "But I do. And I'm certain you wouldn't want me to recount every sordid detail of your academic career right now, would you?" He counters calmly but doesn't wait for her enraged response as he fishes out an envelope with the same letterhead emblazoned on it. It's as pristine and unwrinkled as the fine material of his suit. "Maybe this will go some way to change your mind."

Curiosity is her weakness and he's playing this card perfectly.

With indignation and humiliation still burning her face red, Jane stretches out a hand and takes the corner of the envelope, mindful that her fingers don't brush his at all.

She decides that she dislikes him there and then as her heart skips a beat at the letter's contents.

{…}

When the leaves turn a deep red and start falling from the trees, Jane finally learns to love her newly-adopted city as much as she loves what she does.

The job offer is too enticing to turn down and its benefits too generous to forget. The work with the tesseract is far from done; major reconfigurations are needed after all, to ensure that it can create a stable wormhole but does nothing else funkier than that.

It's too soon before the alluring, twilit world of the lab becomes the loci around which her day is structured. It's also how Jane comes to call Loki's office her own as well, working with the man she proclaims to hate.

It helps that he's always overly critical of her work, dismissive at times of her suggestions, questioning of any discovery on her part and quick to challenge every valid point she makes.

The funny thing is, she probably would have remained in her bubble of scientific-hero worship had he not visited her that day and trashed that image of himself that she'd built up over the months. In many ways, she's thankful to _him_ for showing her what Loki Laufeyson is really like.

What's funnier is that she forgets about her hate when she sees the science that he lays on the table for her, that he's a colleague she's forced to work with when his brilliance temporarily obscures his insufferable flaws, or that there's wit and such surprising depth to him so rarely allowed to surface that every glimpse of it makes her feel as though she has unearthed a treasure.

Had anyone said a word, Jane would have poured scorn on those who noticed that her conversations with Loki have taken started to stray from work and into territory best left unexplored.

She would have also vehemently maintained that no one got past his vague familial issues, least of all her.

She would have also said that he's too complex, too screwed up a (fine) specimen who will stay better as a colleague or an academic rival than as a friend.

In her excitement, Jane chooses not to see how his eyes devour every tiny movement that she makes or every squeak of excitement that emits from her parted lips as they both make headway into turning theory to reality.

It's easier to be oblivious when her own life's only just getting back on track.

{…}

The day of the experiment is a cold winter's day of clear skies and frosted breaths.

The tesseract spins its magic and the energy pulses that run along its spokes are now familiar to her. The portable screen that Jane holds in her hand beeps its readings and she barely manages to stand still in her excitement. She doesn't bother to look, but she knows Loki's own excitement matches her own as he stands next to her adjusting the last few dials of the systems that power the tesseract.

What he doesn't say bleeds out of his body like warning signs if one simply cared to observe. With him, Jane has long learned not to trust the spuriousness of language but rather the surety of actions.

The implications are far-reaching if they succeed. The creation of a wormhole that will hold for a few milliseconds is progress upon which they can build so much.

When the moment arrives, the culmination of their work registers as a small click and a beep on the screen she carries, spewing out readings that confirm the tesseract had indeed done its job correctly this time.

A breathless laugh escapes her. "We did it!"

"We did," Loki confirms, his face more alive than she'd ever seen.

Jane feels a deep, spreading thrill for all of two seconds before the grid channelling an enormous amount of electricity into the testing site overloads and throws the room into darkness. The resulting explosion throws both of them across the hall as they skid into loose equipment littering the floor.

She finds herself pressed flushed into his body as disconnected wires send intermittent showers of sparks that flare around them. That same, bright feverish gaze of his is back, fey and intense like it holds the potential of unlocking infinity. She tries to move off, but she's held still by a steady hand trapping her in place.

"I've never thanked you properly for bringing me back, Jane," he whispers against her neck before she can wrap her head around what just happened.

She stills, suddenly conscious of the heat that he radiates from behind. As though a switch had been flipped, Jane lifts her own eyes to his, chagrined that he's choosing now of all times to say something that shouldn't mean more than what she needs it to be.

"No, you didn't," she answers lamely.

His fingers trail a delicate line down her face as he leans impossibly closer. "Then consider this my thanks."

Jane hisses and jerks backward reflexively when his lips brush hers like a butterfly's flutter against a rose petal. Scrambling off him, she makes a show of dusting herself off, looking anywhere but at him, thankful for the convenient timing of the emergency lamps kicking in to reveal the chaos that's a tesseract splintered into pieces all over the floor.

"Listen, Jane-"

Jane goes back to work as quickly as she can as soon as her superficial injuries get cleaned up.

For once, the equations offer her no comfort.

{…}

Jane celebrates the achievement alone that evening, wondering how things have gone so right and yet so wrong. She gives up on the cheap red wine that she'd bought from the local supermarket and contemplates the bourbon that she'd also picked up on impulse.

She manages a shot and feels dizzy immediately.

The phone sits temptingly in its cradle and she reaches for it.

What she wants to say dies in her throat before her fingers can dial the number long ingrained in her memory.

{…}

The athletic and muscular form of Loki's older brother pops into the lab not too long after the encounter with Loki that she's trying to forget. Thor's breezy, likable nature and sunny good looks turn many heads, but he is only seemingly taken by a short brunette who works in his brother's lab.

Mortified, Jane finds that she still manages to blush and giggle at her age as Thor flirts openly with her. He's only here for two days to run an errand for his parents and he isn't ready to give up on the first pretty face that he sees in town.

Dinner with Thor is suddenly on the cards for tonight and she finds that she can't meet Loki's glacial gaze at all.

She gets ready in front of a mirror that brands her a liar.

Even though Thor is every bit the gentleman and fairly good company, perhaps the only unforgivable bit of the evening is that the sea bass is tasteless and the dessert galling for a restaurant of that calibre.

{…}

It's in the early hours of the morning and many hours after the awkward date with Thor when she knocks on the apartment door where Loki lives.

He lets her in wordlessly, still clad in his shirtsleeves and pants. In her slightly inebriated state, Jane still manages to notice that the picture-perfect Loki is nowhere in sight. His rumpled shirt is buttoned down halfway and his pants are slightly stained with…blood? Or is it lipstick?

And if it is the latter…then…

Then it means that she must have interrupted something she shouldn't have.

The implication crashes down on her like a ton of bricks.

"Why are you here, Jane?" He demands, civility erased from his demeanour when he finally breaks the uncomfortable silence. The image of the gentleman he projects at work is a mirage that has long fizzled out and in its place is someone whose conduct thrives on discarding the rules of polite society.

There isn't a right step that she can take in this mess that's supposedly a friendship spiralling out of control, is there?

"To make amends," she says and doesn't miss the glimmer of triumph flashing across his face the way a blue sky is cut forcibly open by winds that shift the clouds.

"Have you suddenly decided that you are worth my time?" His words are cutting and cruel and she doesn't doubt that he uses every one deliberately.

There will always be no recourse with Loki, no amount of drunkenness that will prepare her for what can come next when _he_ is the only variable in an equation that can't ever be worked out. And because he has robbed all words from her, Jane can only purse her lips and stare at the firm expanse of skin that's revealed by his open shirt.

Finally, she submits to what gravity and impulse dictate of her, kissing him once as she seeks to exorcise the ghosts of his lips on her own and the feel of his fingers on her face. Her own pulse jumps at the contact when his hands curl roughly around her neck and haul her up against him, compressing months of stilted distance into a searing blaze of desire and need.

There's nothing tentative about the second kiss that's accompanied by desperate fumbling in the dark. Skin meets skin in an encounter that Jane knows will not just go down in the history books as a forgotten journal article.

{…}

Over a cup of morning coffee that Loki brings her, Jane busies herself with the abstract. The repaired tesseract that will open galaxies to them stands gleaming in the hall as though it had never been broken.

The unknown and the stars are no longer out of reach and the universe awaits.

She feels the cube's power and smiles to herself.

In another corner of the hall, Loki mimics that action.

-Fin


End file.
